Monday 30 December 2019

Michael Winterbottom: On Adapting Jim Thompson

The Killer Inside Me (Directed by Michael Winterbottom)
The pulp writer Jim Thompson, wrote over 30 novels and is  known for writing some of the bleakest noir ever put to page. Stephen King, who claims Thompson among his favorite authors, wrote with a kind of wonder of Thompson’s desolate stories. “There are three brave lets” in Thompson’s writing, King explained in the introduction to Thompson’s Now and On Earth: “he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.” 

The director Stephen Frears, who adapted Jim Thompson’s The Grifters for film, was struck by the relationship between Thompson’s work and certain aspects of classical Greek tragedy. Thompson’s uncompromising noir informs and feeds back into these tragic aspects to create a vision of a hell in earth; an a stark but recognizable—vision of present day life. This relationship is particularly evident in Thompson’s 1952 masterpiece The Killer Inside Me.

Killer Inside owes much to traditional noir tropes. The principle character, small-town sheriff Lou Ford, is obsessed with setting right a wrong. His brother, he believes, was killed by a corrupt local industrialist. Ford devises a strategy to bring the man down, beyond the law, by setting his son up with a prostitute. Ford however falls in love with the woman himself, but continues with the scheme: to murder both the prostitute and the son and make it look like a murder-suicide. The plan falls apart in the best noir tradition, leading Ford to kill further to cover up his initial crime. The crimes become increasingly savage as Ford’s recklessness grows, but Ford continues to remain convinced right until the end that he’s in control of events and can, ultimately, not face the consequences. By the novel’s end, Ford is in jail and reflecting, in his typically calculated manner, on his crimes, his reasons, and his own state of mind.

British director Michael Winterbottom’s faithful recent adaptation divided critics and audiences. Here he discusses his approach to the book and adaptation in general.


Q: Your method of adapting novels—Tristram Shandy, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge—is not to be strictly faithful to the story or methodology of the source text. How did that play out here?

A: Well, it was the opposite, really. When I read the book, I thought that you could almost film it. The book tells its story through dialogue. Jim Thompson is a brilliant dialogue writer and plotter. And then I approached the people who had the rights, and they already had a version of the screenplay which they’d sent me. In terms of individual scenes, it was very close to the book anyway, but the order had been changed. So my approach was to go back to the original story of the book and really keep the film as accurate and as faithful to the text as possible.

Q: What themes in the novel captivated you, and which of your own did you want to incorporate?

A: I think one of the great things about the book is the pace of the narrative. Within a few pages, the story’s being set up. Lou’s gone to meet Joyce Lakeland, there’s been a moment of violence and sex, and really from that point on, Thompson keeps the story moving so new things are constantly happening. The story unfolds incredibly fast and it was that, I think, that made me feel it would be kind of interesting to make into a film.


Q: The Killer Inside Me is structured as a first-person narrative told by a deranged personality. Was there something about the psychology of Lou Ford that especially intrigued you?

A: Obviously, if you read a book and want to make it into a film, there have to be lots of things you like about it. There’s something about the way Lou narrates his own story that makes you feel sort of close to him, and makes you feel as well that’s something going to happen to redeem him. And what’s brilliant about the way Jim Thompson tells the story is you’re constantly feeling that you’re going to come to this moment of knowledge—and then the book ends! [Laughs] There’s a great story in the middle of the [narrative] that Lou Ford tells. He’s read somewhere that there was a guy who was happily married, who had a wife and a couple of children, and then he got a girlfriend in the neighboring town, and he’s happy with the girlfriend. And one day they discover the girlfriend had been killed and that the wife and children had been killed as well. And as he’s telling the story, he wonders, Why does someone do that? People do these things for no apparent reason, without any explanation. Newspapers are still full of stories like that, about people who seem to live normal lives, love their children and wives, and then they decide to destroy everything, to tear everything up. Lou is that sort of character. The people who he kills are quite close to him. A lot of people in the story love him, a lot of people love him despite the fact that he’s been violent towards them. So there’s a sense of the kind of waste that violence creates, which [anchors] the movie, rather than the psychology of why he does it. There are psychological explanations in the book, but it’s more the sense of that pointlessness and waste, and the tenderness of the situation that attracted me.


Q: A lot of readers of Thompson’s novels have seen aspects of Greek tragedy at play in his work.

A: For me, it’s Shakespearean as well. There’s a sense of this person who people do love, he does have this ability to inspire trust and faith. And yet, whether because of what happened in his childhood or what his father did to him, he feels worthless in a sense. When he’s destroying other people, he’s trying to destroy himself. He feels like he’s not worthy of being happy or being loved. So you have all this kind of stuff going on. Obviously, there’s a big play on fathers in the novel: the relation- ship between Lou and his father, but also between Lou and Sheriff Bob Maples, who’s a sort of alternative father figure, and between Chester Conway and Elmer Conway, who’s another bad father. There’s a pattern of relationships with fathers and surrogate fathers that runs through it. So it’s an incredibly rich book, you know, it’s not necessarily a naturalistic novel. But it’s full of human emotions.

Q: I’m just wondering if Thompson’s connections to cinema interested you at all.

A: In terms of his own writing?


Q: Yeah, his writing for Kubrick, for instance.

A: That would not be a reason for me to make a film of this book. The reason is because it’s a great book and when I read it, I felt it would be a really interesting film to make, and completely different from the films I normally write. In the end, when you choose a film, it’s for that reason. The material is interesting. It’s not that surprising that Jim Thompson had a connection to cinema because he’s brilliant at dialogue, he’s brilliant at stories, and the worlds he writes about in his novels seem like worlds that would be interesting for cinema. I think with Kubrick—I’m not sure what kind of credits he got on the two collaborations [The Killing and Paths of Glory]—I think he got an “additional dialogue” credit on one. I was talking to his daughter, who came onto the set, and she was saying that, you know, he did a lot more work on it than that. So that’s kind of fascinating, but it wasn’t the reason for making the film, obviously...


Q: In general, you invoke genre—road movies, for example—without retaining all the expected codes. Did you see yourself trying to steer clear of certain noir conventions with this film?

A: Only in the sense that from the beginning we didn’t want to do a pastiche of the 1950s. We didn’t want to shoot it in a particular style because of genre or the content of the story. So it’s not a particularly noir-looking film. Jim Thompson is a great writer, but he’s a very simple, direct writer. He’s very focused on the story and the character and what’s happening and why are they doing that. Really, he’s writing very lean and kind of spare. So it was trying to be true to that more than [make it] look or feel like a noir fifties’ film. So in that sense, perhaps, we got away from generic convention, I’m not sure. But basically, it’s okay, this is how the book works, and [we said] let’s find an approach to the film that will be in keeping with that...

Q: In the past, when you’ve made period dramas like Jude or The Claim, you always manage to retain a very contemporary language and feel to the way you dramatize things. Is that something you’ve continued here, with The Killer Inside Me?

A: Well, I think Jim Thompson’s stories are actually very contemporary, and one of the things is that it’s someone writing in the early fifties about small-town Midwest America, talking about the sex and violence that goes on behind closed doors. The dialogue we’re using in the film is very much taken from the book. Even so, it feels very contemporary because when you read the novel, it’s very fresh. You really don’t feel you’re reading a creaky old period piece.

– Excerpted from Michael Winterbottom. Interviews. Edited by Damon Smith, 2009.

Monday 23 December 2019

From Pen to Screen: Charlie Kaufman

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Directed by Michel Gondry)

Prior to his career in movies, Charlie Kaufman worked in the circulation department of a newspaper in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He eventually relocated to California and began writing for the tv sitcom Get a Life, starring Chris Elliott as a 30-year-old paperboy. 

Kaufman continued to create television comedy throughout the early 1990s, before his breakthrough screenplay for Spike Jonze's unexpectedly successful Being John Malkovich (1999). The black comedy stars John Cusack as a puppeteer who discovers a doorway leading into the brain of actor John Malkovich. Kaufman's screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award and received several other accolades. His screenplay for Adaptation (2002), directed by Jonze once again, was motivated by his struggles adapting writer Susan Orlean's nonfiction book The Orchid Thief for the screen. The film's dual storyline blurs the borders between reality and fiction, exposing Kaufman's writer's block and mocking his initial aversion to make material dazzling enough for Hollywood. Meryl Streep portrayed Susan Orlean, while Nicolas Cage portrayed both Charlie Kaufman and his fictitious twin brother, Donald Kaufman, who was given a cowriting credit on the screenplay for Adaptation.

Kaufman next penned the screenplay for George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, based on the allegedly true storey of Chuck Barris, host of television's The Gong Show. Kaufman's screenplay for the genre-defying Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) uses a broken timeline to tell the narrative of two former lovers (Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) who undergo a scientific procedure that permanently erases their memory of the relationship. Kaufman won his first Academy Award for best original screenplay for this film. 

Kaufman made his directorial debut in 2008 with Synecdoche, New York, a complex investigation of mortality and art that is even more self-reflexive than Kaufman's previous work. Philip Seymour Hoffman starred as a physically declining theatre director embarking on a years-long production of his magnum opus, a sprawling drama that eventually spans a city-sized stage filled by hundreds of perpetually working actors. Though the picture had mixed reviews and a small audience during its theatrical run, it garnered multiple accolades and critical acclaim.

In the following extract acclaimed writer-director Charlie Kaufman discusses his early days growing up in New York, his transition from acting to screenwriting, and his unique creative process.


Were you an avid filmgoer in your early years and, if so, which films were particularly meaningful to you?

I wouldn’t say I was obsessed with watching movies. I liked movies and I went often, but I’m not like Quentin Tarantino, I’m not that person. I gravitated more toward theater and acting, and film was kind of an offshoot of that, as it had acting and theater in it. I also made a lot of movies when I was a little kid. I had a Super 8 camera, and it was a real passion of mine. I made films with stories, little dramatic things, and I’d write scripts for a monster or vampire movie. We’d shoot in graveyards, and I did some animation. I’d direct the films, and my friends and I would act in them.

You started out as an actor in high school and performed in several plays. What made you decide to make the transition to screenwriting?

Since third grade, I wanted to be an actor. I went to school for it in my freshman year of college, and then I switched to film in my sophomore year. I think I became self-conscious. I was very shy, and I became kind of embarrassed about it. I struggled for a long time because I really loved it. It was the one thing in my life that gave me some sort of joy. Then I thought, did I make a mistake by leaving it, because I don’t feel the same way about anything else? I always thought about going back and I never did, but I don’t feel that way about it anymore. I don’t think I could do it anymore.


What are the main differences between writing a screenplay for someone else to direct and directing your own screenplay yourself?

With the exception of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), I haven’t written specifically for any director. Spike was not initially engaged to be part of Adaptation (2002); that was for Jonathan Demme, and then he decided not to do it. Being John Malkovich (1999) was written before I knew Spike.

I think the difference is that, once I began directing, I started thinking, how am I going to do this? Practically, how am I going to make this happen on film, which is something I had never thought about. When I worked with Spike, if I had been doing a rewrite and I had an idea, he would say, “Well, don’t worry about what it costs. We’ll figure it out.” So I was kind of given carte blanche. But when I’m on my own, there is this feeling of, well, am I going to know how to shoot this scene? Am I going to be able to afford to shoot this scene? That’s the difference.


I’m interested in how you build and structure your screenplays. Do you follow a similar pattern every time?

It depends on the piece. When I’m on my own and I'm doing something for myself, I don’t do an outline. I build it, little by little, as I’m working on it. I think about it for like six months, and I’ll think, “Oh, that’s interesting here!” It’s going in a cool direction, but I don’t know in advance how it’s going to end. I like to have the freedom to see where it goes. I don’t like to cement myself into something.

Sometimes it can take me a few years; it’s not an efficient way to work. I do like the idea that sometimes I come to a new thing, six months into writing it, and that changes everything. Adaptation is an example of that. It was a struggle for me in the first six months, until I came up with the idea of putting myself in, and then suddenly I knew how to write it. If I had forced myself to write any more, it wouldn’t have been the same, and I don’t think it would have been as good.


You mentioned loving the theater earlier. Who are some of your favorite dramatists?

I like Pinter, I like Beckett, Ionesco. When I was in high school, I was actually in a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Pirandello. I was really struck by that, and it was very influential on me. Interestingly, I think Woody Allen has a play in one of his books, where the characters on stage talk to the audience. I like stuff like that. I liked Lanford Wilson when I was a kid, and I like John Guare.

I also loved musicals when I was a kid. I mean, when you’re in school theater you do a lot of musicals!

Finally: you’re on a desert island and are allowed to take one film with you. Which film would it be and why?

A movie I really love is Barton Fink. I don’t know if that’s the movie I’d take to a desert island, but I feel like there’s so much in there, you could watch it again and again. That’s important to me, especially if that was the only movie I’d have with me for the rest of my life.

– Excerpted from ‘From Pen to Screen: An Interview with Charlie Kaufman’ by Neil McGlone (article here).

Tuesday 17 December 2019

Kurosawa, Tarkovsky and Solaris

Solaris (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)
‘I was on very intimate terms with Tarkovsky. I always felt like he was my younger brother. Drinking together, we sang the theme of Seven Samurai. His expression of the element of water! It was unique, indeed. Watching this film [Solaris] always makes me want to return to Earth.’ 
- Kurosawa on Tarkovsky

Akira Kurosawa first met Andrei Tarkovsky in Moscow on his first visit to Russia in July 1971 when Kurosawa attended the Moscow Film Festival. Dodeskaden was screened and won the Special Prize. Tarkovsky then went to Japan to re-pay the visit that same fall and the two directors remained friends until Tarkovsky’s untimely death in 1986. Tarkovsky told Kurosawa that he always viewed Seven Samurai before shooting a new film. Kurosawa replied that he would always see Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev before shooting...

Originally written by Akira Kurosawa and published in May 1977 the following article titled ‘Tarkovsky and Solaris’ recalls the early relationship between the two great directors. It was translated for Nostalghia.com by Sato Kimitoshi and was subsequently adapted by Criterion for use in the insert booklet of their Solaris DVD.

I met Tarkovsky for the first time when I attended my welcome luncheon at Mosfilm during my first visit to Soviet Russia. He was small, thin, looked a little frail, and at the same time exceptionally intelligent, and unusually shrewd and sensitive. I thought he somehow resembled Toru Takemitsu, but I don’t know why. Then he excused himself saying, ‘I still have work to do,’ and disappeared, and after a while I heard such a big explosion as to make all the glass windows of the dining hall tremble hard. Seeing me taken aback, the boss of Mosfilm said with a meaningful smile: ‘You know another World War hasn’t broken out. Tarkovsky just launched a rocket. This work with Tarkovsky, however, has proved a Great War for me.’ That was the way I knew Tarkovsky was shooting Solaris.

After the luncheon party, I visited his set for Solaris. There it was. I saw a burnt down rocket at the corner of the space station set. I am sorry I forgot to ask him as to how he had shot the launching of the rocket on the set. The set of the satellite base was beautifully made at a huge cost, for it was all made up of thick duralumin.


It glittered in its cold metallic silver light, and I found light rays of red, or blue or green delicately winking or waving from electric light bulbs buried in the gagues on the equipment lined up in there. And above on the ceiling of the corridor ran two duralumin rails from which hung a small wheel of a camera which could move around freely inside the satellite base.

Tarkovsky guided me around the set, explaining to me as cheerfully as a young boy who is given a golden opportunity to show someone his favorite toybox. [The director] Bondarchuk, who came with me, asked him about the cost of the set, and left his eyes wide open when Tarkovsky answered it. The cost was so huge: about six hundred million yen as to make Bondarchuk, who directed that grand spectacle of a movie War and Peace, gaze in wonder.

Now I came to fully realize why the boss of the Mosfilm said it was ‘a Great War for me.’ But it takes a huge talent and effort to spend such a huge cost. Thinking ‘this is a tremendous task’ I closely gazed at his back when he was leading me around the set in enthusiasm.


Concerning Solaris I find many people complaining that it is too long, but I do not think so. They especially find too lengthy the description of nature in the introductory scenes, but these layers of memory of farewell to this earthly nature submerge themselves deep below the bottom of the story after the main character has been sent in a rocket into the satellite station base in the universe, and they almost torture the soul of the viewer like a kind of irresistible nostalgia toward mother earth and nature, which resembles homesickness. Without the presence of beautiful nature sequences on earth as a long introduction, you could not make the audience directly conceive the sense of having no-way-out harboured by the people ‘jailed’ inside the satellite base.

I saw this film late at night in a preview room in Moscow for the first time, and soon I felt my heart aching in agony with a longing to returning to the earth as quickly as possible. We have enjoyed marvellous progress in science, but where will it lead humanity after all? This film succeeds in conjuring up sheer fearful emotion in our soul. Without it, a science-fiction movie would be nothing more than a petty fancy.

These thoughts came and went while I was gazing at the screen.


Tarkovsky was together with me then. He was at the corner of the studio. When the film was over, he stood up, looking at me as if he felt timid. I said to him, ‘Very good. It makes me feel real fear.’ Tarkovsky smiled shyly, but happily. And we toasted vodka at the restaurant in the Film Institute. Tarkovsky, who didn’t drink usually, drank a lot of vodka, and went so far as to turn off the speaker from which music had floated into the restaurant, and began to sing the theme of the samurai from Seven Samurai at the top of his voice. As if to rival him, I joined in.

For I was at that moment very happy to find myself living on Earth.

Solaris makes a viewer feel this, and even this single fact shows us that Solaris is no ordinary science-fiction film. It truly somehow provokes pure horror in our soul. And it is under the total grip of the deep insights of Tarkovsky.

There must be many, many things still unknown to humanity in this world: the abyss of the cosmos which a man had to look into, strange visitors in the satellite base, time running in reverse, from death to life, strangely moving sense of levitation, his home which is in the mind of the main character in the satellite station is wet and soaked with water. It seems to me to be sweat and tears that in his heartbreaking agony he sqeezed out of his whole being. And what makes us shudder is the shot of the location of Akasakamitsuke, Tokyo, Japan. By a skillful use of mirrors, he turned flows of head lights and tail lamps of cars, multiplied and amplified, into a vintage image of the future city. Every shot of Solaris bears witness to the almost dazzling talents inherent in Tarkovsky.

Mirror (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)
Many people grumble that Tarkovsky's films are difficult, but I don't think so. His films just show how extraordinarily sensitive Tarkovsky is. He made a film titled Mirror after Solaris. Mirror deals with his cherished memories in his childhood, and many people say again it is disturbingly difficult. Yes, at a glance, it seems to have no rational development in its storytelling. But we have to remember: it is impossible that in our soul our childhood memories should arrange themselves in a static, logical sequence.

A strange train of fragments of early memory images shattered and broken can bring about the poetry in our infancy. Once you are convinced of its truthfulness, you may find Mirror the easiest film to understand. But Tarkovsky remains silent, without saying things like that at all. His very attitude makes me believe that he has wonderful potential in his future.

There can be no bright future for those who are ready to explain everything about their own film.

– ‘Akira Kurosawa: Tarkovsky and Solaris’



Tuesday 29 October 2019

John Cassavetes: On Writing ‘Husbands’

Husbands (Directed by John Cassavetes)
In 1970s Husbands the film's opening subtitle describes it as a "comedy about life, death, and freedom," and these are indeed the film's principal themes. Shaken by the loss of a close friend, three friends embark on a persistently raucous study of what may have been and what might come next. Their introspection results in a profound sense of self-evaluation, but the men are primarily living for the moment as they confront unpleasant truths about themselves, their mortality, and their relationships.

Husbands is an emotional experience, one that is difficult to pin down or easily digest. Filmed and acted with a gruelling directness, with certain sequences proceeding without narrative progression and little character revelation. It emanates unceasing activity and conversation, and Cassavetes' probing camera, which remains subjective and observational, captures with an unrestrained, almost random reality. “ Like life, it’s also very slow and depressing in areas,” writes Tom Charity. “The one thing it’s not is a shorthand film.” Private macho bravado seeps into the public realm, signifying a self-centeredness and recklessness regardless of the context. The men's interactions with women are clumsy, inarticulate. Cassavetes continued to edit the picture seemingly searching for a satisfactory version. Despite its brilliant exuberance, humour, despair, darkness and indulgences, or perhaps because of it, the final result was a critical and commercial failure.

Perhaps Geoff Andrew comes closest to best describing the great achievement of Husbands:

“But Cassavetes no more condoned the men’s boozily boisterous behaviour than he condemned it. He wasn’t interested in judging his characters as they embark on their binge, first in New York, then in London, following a friend’s funeral. Rather, his concern was always to represent human behaviour, in all its flawed, self-contradictory perversity, as honestly as he could. And if that meant showing a trio of middle-aged New York commuters being irresponsible, selfish, petulant, boorish, even boringly repetitive at times, so be it. The truth isn’t always attractive.

“The truth is fascinating, however, and it’s important. More to the point here, it’s also rare in American cinema, since film has usually been primarily regarded – by the Hollywood studios, at any rate – not as art but as a) a means of making money, and b) a source of entertainment, pure and simple. So endings should be clear, closed and happy, characters should be easily categorisable as good or bad, and stories should adhere to conventions already known to be popular.

“Husbands is a marvellous example of his methods. With its ultra-naturalistic performances, its simple, meandering narrative (‘story’ is far too strong a word for what happens) and its long takes, it makes for a warts-and-all study of male pride, self-pity, frustration and friendship that is at once properly serious and sharply funny.

“It’s the kind of brave, devil-may-care film that shows up the artistic timidity – and, indeed, the dishonesty (be it emotional, social, political or psychological) – of so much mainstream cinema. Small wonder Cassavetes remains one of the most important influences on filmmakers keen to preserve their independence. He understood, and repeatedly proved, that one didn’t have to tell lies in order to be entertaining. After all, what could be more interesting than life as it’s lived by recognisably real human beings?”

In the following excerpts John Cassavetes discusses his approach to writing a screenplay, how it relates to his life and how artistic freedom determines the path the script takes.


Before Husbands was a screenplay, I must have done about 400 pages of notes. I thought about it for several years. Then there was a screenplay. My first draft was abominable – all the pitfalls of that first-told tale – a slick farce predicated on men running away from their wives to the lure of the will. There are certain catchphrases that people are attracted to made famous by Time magazine, such as ‘Swinging London’ – and there’s always someone standing around behind you who says, ‘That sounds funny,’ but when you look into the eyes of two artists who want the best for themselves and want to be associated with something that has some meaning that’s not good enough. The characters were empty. During the second half of 1968, Ben, Peter and I passed dozens of revisions of the script around everywhere we went. From Rome [where most of the interiors of Machine Gun McCain were filmed] we had been to Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco [where the exteriors for Machine Gun McCain were filmed], Los Angeles and back to New York [where Gazzara lived and Cassavetes was supervising the release of Faces]. We had followed each other around using every spare moment we could find to assess the values of three men – three New Yorkers with jobs, who had passed the plateau of youth, who were married and happy and living in Port Washington, Long Island, the commuters’ paradise. That’s as far as we got in one year. Long conversations until five o’clock in the morning. Back and forth the story went.

The characters in Husbands are quite different from those in Faces. I mean Faces was about people who were just getting by. These guys don’t want to just get by in life. They want to live. I don’t really know what Husbands is about at this point. You could say it’s about three married guys who want something for themselves. They don’t know what they want, but they get scared when their best friend dies. Or you could say it is about three men that are in search of love and don’t know how to attain it. Or you could say it is about a person of sentiment. Every scene in the picture will be our opinions about sentiment. I try to talk to the actors and try to find out what I really think about sentiment. It may turn harsh or bitter; but I can allow anything as long as I know we are honest. We worked with no story, basically no story except what I mentioned, and worked for a year to try to solve it and to gain, to get something out of it.


When you make a film whose interest is to take an extremely difficult subject, deal with it in depth and see if you can find something in yourself, and if other people can find other things within themselves that they will be able to develop in their personal life, it’s great. After being an actor for a few years you really don’t care about money, fame or glory anymore; those things are good, but you need something more.

Cassavetes’ elusiveness about the subject of his film was neither modesty nor coyness. He believed that to lock himself into a predetermined story or a preconceived conception of his characters’ identities was too limiting. To play a ‘character’ in a ‘narrative’ was to reduce the sliding, shifting complexity of life to cartoon clichés.

Each moment was found as we went along – not off the cuff, not without reason – but without a preconceived notion that forbids people from behaving like people and tells a ‘story’ that is predictable – and untrue. I hate knowing my theme and my story before I really start. I like to discover it as I work. In Husbands the off-the-set relationship between Gazzara, Falk and myself determined a lot of the scenes we created as we went along. It was a process of discovering the story and the theme. When you know in advance what the story is going to be, it gets boring really fast. At one point we decided that we weren’t even going to shoot in London; Peter broke into laughter and so did I. What a ter- rific thrill to tell the truth – to not protect some stupid idea that doesn’t work. From then on, it didn’t matter if it was London, Paris, Hamburg – or Duluth!


I believe that if an actor creates a character out of his emotions and experiences, he should do with that character what he wants. If what he is doing comes out of that, then it has to be meaningful. If Peter and Ben and I have three characters, why should a director come in and impose a fourth will? If the feelings are true and the relationship is pure, the story will come out of that. If you don’t have a script, you don’t have a commitment to just saying lines. If you don’t have a script, then you take the essence of what you really feel and say that. You can behave more as yourself than you would ordinarily with someone else’s lines. Most directors make a big mystery of their work; they tell you about your character and your responsibility to the overall thing. Bullshit. With people like Ben and Peter you don’t give directions. You give freedom and ideas.

An actor can’t suddenly deny or reject a part of himself under the pretext of playing a particular character, even if that’s what he would like to do. You can’t ask someone to forget themselves and become another person. If you were asked to play Napoleon in a picture, for example, you can’t really have his emotions and thoughts, only yours. You could never actually be Napoleon, only yourself playing him. I’ve never wanted to play a role. Honestly, I never have! That indicates to me that you want to step forward and show someone something, and that terrifies me, really. What you want to do is be invisible as that character, so that there’s no pressure on you worrying about the outside world.

You made a role yours not by ‘acting’, but by believing in it, by adding something of yourself to it, by playing it personally.


I get bored seeing two people that are supposed to be in love, who kiss, screw or whatever they do. I get bored by that because they’re only supposed to do those things. I don’t really believe that they’re doing that, and I couldn’t care less. It always struck me when I used to go see pictures as a kid at Times Square that when it came to the love scenes everybody used to boo. But once in a while you’d see a picture like Red Shoes, and no matter how tough the audience was, they would root for the love story because these people didn’t pretend to be in love with each other – they were in love with each other.

All the people I meet make up my films. I make movies not about somebody else’s, but my life!
But the deepest connection between the actor and the character is their shared sense that it is critical to seize the moment and not let life pass you by.

Some people can’t wait. That’s the only reason I’m attracted to people. Because we don’t want to let the moments go by. Those are the ones I am attracted to. We might not be here tomorrow. I make every picture like it’s the last day of my life. You got anything to say, you put it in there now. Don’t hold back. What are you waiting for?


I make my films out of my problems. You know, I have problems, you have problems. You won’t admit it. I will admit it because I’m an artist. My job is to put emotions out on the surface. Not to report on other people’s emotions, but to put your own emotions out on the surface. My brother had died at thirty and I loved him and my life changed. That’s all. Simple as that. It was over so quickly, and I just had no room in my life. When someone dies that young there is no time to say good- bye. I was young and working and everything else and I couldn’t do anything except stagger around for a while, then try to reevaluate where I was. So I made a picture. I didn’t make a picture about my dead brother; I made a picture that was affected by the death of a best friend and these three men. I dedicated Husbands to him. You ask me why I do these things? I don’t know why I do them. I hope it means something to certain people that have suffered loss and don’t know how to express it.

– Excerpts from Raymond Carney: Cassavetes on Cassavetes.

Tuesday 22 October 2019

Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later – Part Two


All discussions of Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise begin with the miracle of its making. Named at Cannes as the greatest French film of all time, costing more than any French film before it, Les Enfants du Paradis was shot in Paris and Nice during the Nazi occupation and released in 1945. Its sets sometimes had to be moved between the two cities. Its designer and composer, Jews sought by the Nazis, worked from hiding. Carne was forced to hire pro-Nazi collaborators as extras; they did not suspect they were working next to resistance fighters. The Nazis banned all films over about 90 minutes in length, so Carne simply made two films, confident he could show them together after the war was over. The film opened in Paris right after the liberation, and ran for 54 weeks. It is said to play somewhere in Paris every day.

That this film, wicked, worldly, flamboyant, set in Paris in 1828, could have been imagined under those circumstances is astonishing. That the production, with all of its costumes, carriages, theaters, mansions, crowded streets and rude rooming houses, could have been mounted at that time seems logistically impossible (It is said, wrote Pauline Kael, that the starving extras made away with some of the banquets before they could be photographed). Carne was the leading French director of the decade 1935-1945, but to make this ambitious costume film during wartime required more than clout; it required reckless courage.

– Roger Ebert

The following is the second part from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and the author of the 1998 book The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon. Translation by Bona Flecchia and Alexandre Mabilon.


BS: Forty-five years after its original release, Children of Paradise is still playing in Paris and New York. People say the film is timeless and tireless. Why do you think this is the case?

MC: I have no idea. I can’t pretend I know. When we made the film, we thought it was an important one. It was very long, expensive, with lots of sets and characters, so we knew it would stand out that year, if only because of the production values. We looked at the rushes; we were satisfied with them. But I didn’t like to talk about my films anymore, because I’d had so much fun with Drôle de drame, but when it was released, it received a violently negative critique. People didn’t laugh, while I had enjoyed making it so much.

BS: People, both critics and general audiences, often speak of a sense of richness in Children of Paradise, and of how the film communicates an intense, complex feeling, like life itself. Could you explain how you created that feeling?

MC: First of all, it has to do with the number of characters. It’s a pretty straightforward story. Three men are in love with the same woman in different ways . . . Maybe there are four of them. Anyway, there’s the mime, Frédérick Lemaître, and the count. The important ones are three, at least. Lacenaire loves her as well, in his own way. And she loves each one of them too. I mean . . . There’s a critic who tried to explain it, created a metaphor. He said this story is like a photo developer that would react differently to four different chemicals being dropped into different baths. It’s kind of like that, and that’s what makes for its richness and length. It’s not two men loving the same woman, or two women loving the same man. It’s a lot more complicated than that. The first one, the mime, is shy. The second one is a lady-killer who can’t love and who will discover true love. Lacenaire is the intelligent one who wants to impress her. He finds her very intelligent. She’s not very well educated, but she certainly is intelligent. The count wants to appear with a beautiful lady at his side. He begins to love her when he feels her slipping away. So this plot makes for a complex film. Especially when you consider all the supporting roles. When you have to choose forty, forty-two, fifty-three, or however many people are necessary, you say to yourself, “I can’t make any mistakes.” Because you’re like the conductor—and this is the same for the crew—who has to audition everyone in order to form his orchestra.


BS: Do you lose sleep over picking out your crew?

MC: Of course. When you’re shooting, you’re a bundle of nerves. I am not the same man. I mean, I’m less nervous now because I’m older, but when you think of the amount of pressure you’re under . . . It’s not that I’m proud or cocky, but beforehand, I never fully realize what my expectations of the crew are. When I shot Drôle de drame, all I had made was a little film that was a study in style, and I wasn’t afraid of asking [Louis] Jouvet, [Françoise] Rosay, Michel Simon, Barrault. It was a fantastic crew for a quasi-beginner. I asked them to work with me without thinking about it. Port of Shadows was the same. [Jean] Gabin is the one who wanted me to make it; he wanted to do a movie with me.

BS: What has happened to French cinema since?

MC: I wouldn’t know. When I’m on a television show abroad, somebody inevitably asks me, “Marcel Carné, you belonged to the golden age of French cinema . . .” and so on. It saddens me. And unfortunately, I can’t say they’re wrong. Thanks to the war, we had a certain advantage, since the cinema industry was in full swing. So we could more readily get money to make movies. Nowadays, it’s harder. You have to be a businessman.


BS: How do you feel, from where you’re standing, about the aversion of critics in the so-called New Wave to the cinéma de qualité and the studio system?

MC: It could quite simply be called ambition. To say, “Fine, here I go.” That’s what it is. What was serious was when critics followed suit. But then they became afraid of appearing old-fashioned by defending the cinéma de papa, as we call it. And they made fun of its French quality, which is there. They didn’t do anything—nothing important, anyway. They never made a Carnival in Flanders, a Grand Illusion, or a Children of Paradise, forgive my saying so. They made “intimate” films with some kind of elevator music—like Truffaut. I’m not criticizing Truffaut, but one day we inaugurated a movie theater in the suburbs where there were two theaters: a Truffaut Theater and a Carné Theater. And we went up on the stage together. Truffaut had dragged my name through the mud, mind you, but I was very honored to have my name together with Truffaut’s. I’m not sure he felt the same way. He said so many nasty things about me . . . Anyway, he had no comment, which was easy to do after ten years. He finished his speech by saying, “I’ve made twenty-three movies, and I’d give them all up to have done Children of Paradise.” What could I say after that? Nothing. He said it in front of three or four hundred people, but it was never written down . . . I am not upset with him anymore. At that time, if I was in a studio or whatever, and Mr. Godard came in, he said nothing to me, not even hello. It’s almost as if he turned his back on me. I mean, I didn’t like many of his movies, but I found some things interesting once in a while, like in Weekend and Pierrot le fou. Those movies were quite sassy. Well, sassy may be a bit slangy, so let’s say they were bold. When they said, “At least we can shoot on location, something the old filmmakers couldn’t do”—they shot on location, fine, but they owe that to the talents of the photochemists and engineers, not to their own. Negatives now are sensitive even to the light of small fixtures. Where we needed huge ones that weighed twenty to thirty pounds, they have little ones the size of lightbulbs. The same can be said about sound. When I started, we had a truck on the set with a whole system and three technicians, including a boom guy who made shadows on the walls of the set. If they didn’t have the photosensitivity of the new negative, if they didn’t have engineers, and if they had kept the cameras and projectors we used to have, they could have never shot their films on location. It wasn’t easy. I remember I wanted to shoot I forget which film at Paul-Louis Veller’s palace in the Marais. He said, “No way. You’re a good friend, and if you want to organize a dinner for the release, I’ll be glad to help you. But I’ll never let you put your equipment on my antique wooden floor. Even if you were my own son, I would not allow it.”


BS: In Children of Paradise, which character do you identify with the most, in terms of your own sensibility; which one do you admire?

MC: You can’t admire them. They’re all different. I admire Barrault’s sensibility, Brasseur’s ease of speech, and the breeding of the count. Never has an actor seemed so noble as [Louis] Salou. He had so much class . . . I can’t say. The one I feel most akin to is Barrault/Deburau. When all is said and done, I am a big sentimentalist, even if I don’t seem that way. In terms of my private and intimate life, I’m very vulnerable.

MC: No! I don’t think so. There are . . . let me think . . . other unhappy lovers. I don’t know. They did a biography on Molière. He was unlucky in love. What’s funny is that all great men had wives who cheated on them, almost all of them. Even kings—which was dangerous for the one who cheated, but it’s a fact . . . I don’t think so. It may be that, because he communicates more, he is more expressive through his face and gestures than the others.

BS: Is that side of Deburau’s character, his using images as a means of expression, something you feel close to?

MC: Maybe, maybe. Pantomime was not my forte, at least not consciously. But there were some things I showed Jean-Louis by miming them. It wasn’t easy to shoot.

BS: We spoke about the shooting of Children as a series of successes, with very few problems. Didn’t you have any difficulties or friction during the shoot.


MC: No friction at all. When we shot the carnival scene, though, something horrible happened for which I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive myself . . . We shot the carnival scene, and the assistant director told me there were two guys asking for one of the extras in the office. “Do they look French?” I asked. “Yes, they have Nice accents. The extra’s wife is very sick, and she wants to see her husband before she dies.” You understand, we were living in fear back then, so I asked him what they looked like. “They look French. They don’t look like Gestapo . . .” We still didn’t know then. We learned all those things a little at a time. I said, “Did they look at the list of those present?” All the extras usually sign in when they get in, so if someone gets here late or goes for a walk . . . He said no. I said, “Tell them he’s not here.” We continued to shoot, and he came back, saying, “Mr. Carné, I am sorry to insist, but the wife got hit by a tram and had both her legs cut off. She’s going to die without seeing her husband unless he’s at the hospital in one hour.” I wasn’t sure what to do. I had given them an answer, so I sent the assistant director to get the extra. They went into the office, and the assistant director came back five minutes later, haggard. It was two Gestapo agents. I never forgave myself for that.

Remember I told you about a leader of the Resistance in my crew? That was him. I grabbed him and said, “How could you not tell they were Gestapo? They have suits and a certain look. Even I can recognize them. How could you, a leader of the Resistance, not be able to tell?” He told me I couldn’t have told either. They had Nice accents; they looked French. The Gestapo was very influential in Nice.

BS: During the shoot, you had people working clandestinely on the film.

MC: We had [Alexandre] Trauner and [Joseph] Kosma . . . Trauner did the models of the sets, not the sets themselves, for Les visiteurs du soir, and I had to go and get them past Nice, in a faraway town. And there was [Georges] Wakhevitch for Les visiteurs du soir, and [Léon] Barsacq for Children, who accepted the work. It was brave because I risked going to the camps, whereas Prévert, who didn’t choose the crew, didn’t. It was my responsibility. Once, I went over there to see the models, and Trauner wanted to come to Nice to see how the set of the castle had turned out. Prévert talked him out of it and told me he’d almost decked him. After that, he hid in a cabin in the middle of the forest. Kosma was in a little hotel hidden in the trees right outside Cannes. He gave me the lyrics for two songs for Les visiteurs, and he thanked me, the guy who gave him work, by saying that he was the one who had composed the music for Les visiteurs, when it was actually Maurice Thiriet. He did the hunt, the tournament, the entire orchestration. Kosma asked for the rights to it in court and lost. They both did their part. He only gave me two pages. After that, Trauner always tried to brush me aside, almost pretending he was the filmmaker. So I let it go for a while, but finally I told everyone the truth. Furthermore, those two are far from having worked on all my movies. Same with Schüfftan, who made three films with me, out of twenty-three. It’s not many.

BS: What dedication do you want to put on the film when it goes to home video and gets viewed by the entire world?

MC: What I’d do . . . I’ll tell you what moves me the most. When they stop me in the street, if they recognize me, they never tell me I am really talented or that my films are great. They always, always say: “Thank you for the joy you have given me.” So I hope that this disc will provide them with equal joy. It doesn’t move me because I am a very sensitive person but because it makes me happy to hear it. I’ll always remember the first time I went into a theater to see people’s reactions to Hôtel du Nord. I saw them laughing—everybody was laughing. And it made me happy.

For the first part of this interview see here.

– Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later. For further resources on Marcel Carné and Children of Paradise, visit www.marcel-carne.com.

Tuesday 15 October 2019

Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later – Part One



A major work in world cinema, Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise) is Marcel Carné's best-known and most-loved film. From the moment a stage curtain opens to reveal the entire expanse of an 1820s Paris boulevard's clutter, disarray, the reciprocity between art and life is evident. Its enduring appeal stems less from individual talents and personalities (although Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Pierre Brasseur were never better) and more from the film's intense ethos of invention and quality, Carné's poised compositional sense, and, most importantly, the film's "warmth and kindness." Carné's theatricalized melodramatic universe, essentially a film about actors performing, blends many performance genres – tragedy, Shakespeare, pantomime – while retaining Poetic Realism's combination of pessimism and romanticism. As Pauline Kael acknowledged, this is a cinema poetry "about the nature and forms of love - sacred and profane, unselfish and possessive." 

The film was completed after two years of delayed production at the Victorine studios in Nice. The building needs for the Boulevard du Crime alone were astonishing, as this is where the majority of the external action occurs. Three months were spent removing 800 cubic metres of earth and replacing it with 35 tonnes of scaffolding. The fifty facades of theatres and other structures required 350 tonnes of plaster and 500 square metres of glass. When Carné learned of the Allies' Normandy invasion in May 1944, he purposefully held down the post-production process. He intuitively recognised that Les enfants du paradis, rather than being the final film of the Occupation, could be the first film of the Liberation. Such a method was appropriate for a film that emphasised the individual's freedom in the face of social constraints: upon its premiere in March 1945, the film became a major economic success, screening in Paris for nearly a year and grossing 41 million francs. According to Jill Forbes, the film's primary significance was its contribution to a nationalist effort, as filmmakers, Vichy sympathisers, and French patriots all desired "to beat the Americans at their own game by producing a stunning film that was distinctively French." If Les enfants du paradis was an overt attempt to rehabilitate the French film industry, it was also a covert attempt to utilise film to confront the horrors of the Occupation. It exemplifies a sort of 'symbolic resistance' in which an occupied populace reclaims its self-respect through "uplifting displays of national narcissism and self-esteem." Indeed, what is particularly remarkable is how Carné and Prévert managed to cloak an allegory of French resistance against German occupation. The picture threw a pall over the careers of everyone involved - unlike Carné, few of its cast members ever achieved such heights again. Nonetheless, its audacious sexual exploration, subversive cultural strategy, and proto-postmodernist blending of high and low art earn it a position in cinema's pantheon.


The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and the author of the 1998 book The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon. Translation by Bona Flecchia and Alexandre Mabilon.


Brian Stonehill: What are your fondest memories of the making of Children of Paradise?

Marcel Carné: I shot the film during World War II. I was very bold then, and thinking about it now, it was madness to make such a film in a country lacking the bare necessities. Anyway, I started working on Children of Paradise, and the producer told me that, given the enormous success of Les visiteurs du soir—it had been a big hit at the box office—he now wanted a great film with great impact. It’s rare for a producer to come to a director with such a proposal, so of course I began to think. [Jacques Prévert and I] were living near Nice then, and one day, walking along the promenade des Anglais, scouring for ideas, we ran into Jean-Louis Barrault. I hadn’t seen him since the war began, and we went for a drink. Naturally, we talked nonstop about the theater, and he started to tell us about what had happened to the mime [Jean-Gaspard] Deburau. The artist was at the height of his fame—not that he was world-renowned, because at the time news didn’t travel so fast, but he was very famous in Paris and even in the French provinces. He was walking arm in arm with his mistress—he was wealthy then—when a drunkard called out to him and insulted the woman profusely, calling her a whore and all sorts of names. Seeing that the man was drunk, Deburau pushed him aside. The man, with that insistence peculiar to drunkards, came back at him. Finally, Deburau, exasperated, hit the man with his cane and, by some fluke, killed him. So he was tried, and it was a very public trial. But the reason we were so taken by the story, and why we would have liked to do it, was that the whole of Paris attended the trial only to hear the mime speak, to know what his voice sounded like. We thought it was a fantastic idea. We went back to our country retreat, near Nice, and started thinking. We soon realized that it wasn’t a good idea for a movie, that if we chose Barrault to play the part of Deburau, the audience would already be familiar with his voice. There was no suspense. And on the other hand, if we chose some unknown actor, people would have mocked his voice. So we gave up the idea . . . Well, actually, Prévert wanted to give up, but I said no, because I felt that the period in question—the boulevard du Crime, the theater—and a film paying tribute to it sounded good to me. So I went to the great Musée Carnavalet in Paris, to the prints department, sure that I would bring back some stuff. I also wanted to go to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to a little bookstore I knew about a hundred yards from here, and to another one right behind it, to look for books about that period and its theater. I went to the Carnavalet and had copies of two hundred prints made. I found three or four books about the theater, and in one of those I found out that the upper balcony was called “Paradise.”


BS: And that wasn’t a common expression at the time.

MC: Not common at all. Nobody used it. Now people call it the henhouse, in common terms . . . So we played around with words. There was a toy store that no longer exists, on the rue Saint-Honoré, close to the Madeleine. It was called the Paradise of Children. So we called the film Children of Paradise, but it can bear a double meaning. The children could be the dead, so they are in heaven/paradise, or they could be the actors who play those characters. Also, the actors can be the children of the audience up there in Paradise.

BS: Was the Grand Théâtre actually directly facing the Théâtre des Funambules, the way it is [in the film]?

MC: No, it’s not facing it, it’s next to it. If you look at the boulevard du Crime, the Funambules is farther down, and the Grand Théâtre is on the left. Everything is on the left. There’s nothing on the right except panels of buildings for background shots. But we couldn’t build anything too spectacular, since the set was eighty to a hundred yards long . . . So we worked, we discussed the actors we could use. The great thing about Jacques was that we had the same taste when it came to actors. We liked and hated—well, “hated” may be a bit much, but we liked and disliked the same ones. And that was always the case. There was never a time when I mentioned using an actor and he’d say no because he didn’t like him or her.

So we started working suddenly and furiously. We realized that the film was going to be very long. See, people said that the performers on the boulevard du Crime were geniuses. We had to show that. It’s too easy to say that Mr. So-and-so is a genius. You have to express that he was a genius, was well respected, brilliant, and so on. You have to show it somehow, and that takes up reel time. French movies are generally about an hour and forty minutes long. We realized we had an additional twenty to thirty minutes of footage. People said that there was too much dialogue, although thirty-seven minutes of the film is pantomime. Anyway, we had to add those thirty-seven minutes to the hour and forty minutes. I said I didn’t want that responsibility. The producer was the director of the Studios de la Victorine in Nice. So I went down to Nice to see the producer. I told him everything was going well, that we were happy, and he was enthusiastic about the subject we’d chosen. Then I told him, “There’s a small problem, André [Paulvé]. The film is going to be very long.” He said, “What do you mean by very long?” I replied, “It’s going to be two hours and ten or fifteen minutes.” Of course, he replied, “But that’s going to cost a lot more money. And I’m not going to have any returns.” We thought about it, and he said to me, “Do you want to do it in two parts? Because I could manage that.” Two hours and fifteen minutes does not amount to two parts, so I said, “Listen, I can’t agree to make two parts all by myself. I’m going back to the country to see Prévert.” I had to take a tiny little train. It took three or four hours to travel six or seven miles. It was ridiculous. Jacques and I thought about it, and he finally said, “Yes, we can do it.” I went back down to Nice; the phone didn’t work, or at least not very well, so I had to go back down to tell André whether or not I accepted. I did, on the condition that in Paris, at least at first, they would project both parts in the same movie theater.


When we showed the film to Gaumont, which ended up becoming the final distributor, I said, “This is what the first producer promised me.” They told me they were under no obligation to honor the original producer’s commitment and asked me if I had any documents. I told them that I didn’t, that I simply trusted the producer’s word. We went through what seemed the longest negotiation. They eventually agreed. So we doubled the ticket price. I also asked them, “When you show the three-hour-and-ten-minute film, if I’m right, you’ll show it at 2:00, 5:30, and 9:00.” They said, “Yes.” So I went on, “I’d like for people to be able to buy tickets from the box office at 9:00 p.m.” They said, “That’s impossible—we’ll need one more person.” I said, “Come on, don’t make me laugh.” “Even worse, we’ll need two, since there are two theaters.” But I got them to agree because I had noticed that movies were doing very well during the war. We had no entertainment—no more television, no restaurants. The only thing left was the performing arts. That’s why cinema suddenly took off. French people discovered dance, classical music; they went to concerts and plays . . . I told the producers to do this: we’d sell the tickets at eighty francs apiece, which was double the normal price, and if, at the end of two weeks, revenues were lower, then they could do what they wanted. Revenues didn’t decrease for forty-five weeks. So the film stayed in its original cut.

I don’t know what it’s like in New York, in America, but I had assembled two versions of the movie: one where the film ran all at once, and another where it ran in two parts. The two-parter was shown over two different weeks, so we ran the opening score and a synopsis of what had happened in the first part. When it ran all at once, we didn’t need the synopsis. There was a five-minute intermission, and people would have a beer and come back into the theater, and it would start with Part Two. Pathé always ran the film in two parts, with the synopsis, even if they showed the whole thing at once. The audience got a bit upset, booed a little when they saw the synopsis, but I was never able to get them to show the single-segment version.

BS: What was it like to shoot during the occupation?

MC: It was a bit troublesome. We met with a lot of obstacles when we shot Les visiteurs du soir, in terms of materials—costumes, sets that needed a coat of shiny paint, or staff, which, you know, is made of plaster and horsehair. Horsehair was hard to come by in those days, so we used grass. Furthermore, we needed insulation material to coat the plaster, so we could paint over it before it dried. But we couldn’t find coating material either—it was requisitioned—so we just painted over the wet plaster, and we’d get big splotches forming on it. So we’d stop the take and cover the splotches. Also, we had a shiny paint for the pavement, and the actors would chip it with their shoes. We had ways of fixing it, but it was aggravating. What’s more, people were famished. We’d put fruit on the table, and the fruit was eaten even before we finished setting up. In the end, sadly enough, we had to inject fruit with phenol so the crew wouldn’t eat it. But we still had to put real fruit there for the takes, so the actors could use it. We warned everyone not to eat the fake fruit—it gave them diarrhea—and said that we’d put fresh fruit on the table only when we started shooting. There was a property man who’d set up the fruit plate. We had huge loaves of bread, and once, during a take, a loaf of bread was in my way, so I pushed it away to remove it from the shot, and it felt surprisingly light. I turned it over—there was a hole as big as my hand. The cameramen had eaten the entire inside of the loaf. Things like this happened every day. Satin, silk, velvet, we couldn’t find any of that stuff.


Children of Paradise, miraculously, was much easier. We didn’t need staff so much as wood for the decor, and we found people willing to sell materials—at outrageous prices, of course. A famous English tailor from the Lanvin store was wonderful about providing us with material for Arletty’s dresses. There were people who had materials that you couldn’t find. There were three or four stores of that kind, but those products were reserved for the German officers. Similarly, there were four or five restaurants in Paris for the superior officers, meaning lieutenant colonels and above. A commander was not allowed to go. I went there, even though the prices were exorbitant, but I liked a good meal. I made a pretty good living . . . Well, I did for a while, and then it got a little worse because, while we were shooting the movie, they asked us to make concessions, and I worked for free for six months or so and had to sell my parents’ house.

BS: Did you have any problems with censorship during the making of the film?

MC: Not at all. And yet we feared we might because people had said as much. In Les visiteurs du soir, there was some political innuendo—like the heart beating under the rock represented the heart of France beating under the occupation. The devil was Hitler. All kinds of things like that were interpreted as symbols, while neither Prévert nor myself had even thought about it.

BS: And during Children of Paradise?

MC: We were very scared. Since the film wasn’t finished, we had to be slyer than they were. What was really annoying was when we had scenes with extras, and God knows there were a lot. In the morning, the Germans came in with their own extras, from the unions, and made us use them. So we had to talk them out of it, since we didn’t like them—they were collaborators, you understand. We didn’t want them, so we invented excuses, saying that they didn’t have the right physique for nineteenth-century France. I’d say, “I have nothing against this gentleman, but I can’t use him.” We cheated like that all the time . . . I mean, it wasn’t all that terrible. What was absolutely terrible was that we were closely watched, because of the Resistance.


One day, I asked for one of the production directors—there were two of them—and I was told he would be back in an hour. I said, “He’s not here?” “No, he went to run an errand.” So I said, “Fine.” An hour passed, and then another. So I asked for the production director again—I forget his name. Finally, I found out that he had run off because there were two Gestapo agents waiting for him downstairs in our second-floor studio. We had opened a garage behind the studio to make it into a costume shop, and he fled that way. If, by chance, we hadn’t, the Gestapo would have seized him. I had an assistant director who—he never told me, but I learned later—was one of the leaders of the Resistance. I was upset, but there were obviously a lot of partisans in the crew.

Anyway, I had some problems because Arletty, as we all know, was the mistress of a Gestapo officer. A well-known one, actually, whom I met by chance once—handsome, intelligent, well educated. People despised her because of the affair, and she used to receive threats, like little wooden coffins.

BS: People say that she was even imprisoned at the time of—

MC: She was. Not exactly imprisoned . . . I had a friend who played a page in Les visiteurs du soir and who was good friends with Arletty. When the Resistance began to surface, she hid at this friend’s house. So he called me on the phone, saying, “Marcel, I have to talk to you.” I told him to come by, and he replied, “No, I can’t leave the apartment. I can only meet you at the bistro downstairs.” I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that he would tell me when we met. So I went right away, since he lived close by. He lived on the other side of the Moulin Rouge; it was about a half-mile walk. When I met him, he said, “Arletty’s hiding out in my home.” I said, “That’s a problem. What should we do? Be careful . . . Can’t she go anywhere else?” During that period, there were snipers on the roofs of Montmartre, and they went into homes and searched apartments. Anyway, he left, and two days later, I got a phone call from him saying that Arletty had been arrested in his house. A bunch of partisans knocked at his door. My friend, like an idiot, opened the door, and one of the partisans suddenly said, “Oh, look at the whore over there! Do you see Arletty over there?” So they arrested her, took her away; they came close to shaving her head at the station. They never hit her, but they were very lewd toward her, called her all kinds of nasty names and put her under house arrest outside Paris. There, she had to go see some kind of judge on a daily basis. The judge began to fancy her. Every day she went, and he joked around with her. One morning he said, “How do you feel this morning, Ms. Arletty?” She answered, “Not very ‘resistant.’”

BS: How was it working with her on Children of Paradise?

MC: She was wonderful. She had such stage presence with that double role. You see, Children was infinitely less hassle than Les visiteurs du soir. That’s what you call luck. I had a fantastic crew, because if the crew hadn’t been so solid and tight, since I don’t have a fascist streak in me, nor am I a born leader . . . I mean, you need a center of gravity. You have all the responsibilities, and people have to respond to you. And I never . . . Well, I had some arguments with the technicians, but even those were very mild. I never had serious arguments, and never argued at all with the actors.


BS: How was it working with Jean-Louis Barrault?

MC: He had a lot of input into the pantomime scenes. I chose him because he was a well-known and remarkable mime. [Étienne] Decroux had trained Barrault for a short while too.

BS: Yes, he was his professor—but there was a bit of friction between the two, wasn’t there?

MC: Yes, there was. There was some in the story, but also offstage.

BS: Is there a parallel between the actors’ lives and their roles in the film? Like when we spoke of Arletty earlier, she was also the victim of a judicial blunder.

MC: She clearly was. It was a perfect ending for the first part. It held together pretty well, especially because the first part is a bit longer than the second, and the opposite is usually no good. There are some rules when directing, you know. While shooting, you think the footage is flowing smoothly, but it’s not all usable. I learned about that with [Jacques] Feyder. He said, “See, I showed this scene at length, but when we come to this set, it’ll have to be shorter.”

BS: Did you learn a lot from Feyder?

MC: Not really . . . Well, yes. I did learn how to direct actors. The main influences in my work come especially from German directors, like Fritz Lang, Murnau, Pabst, and Sternberg, mostly for lighting and such. I’m also a fanatic for American cinema. I often watch B movies on television, and there’s always something. I can watch any stupid movie because of the lighting and photography. In France, we can’t work as well with color as we did with black and white. All the colors are very realistic, which is quite strange. If there’s a lamp here, the light has to come from that lamp. [Eugen] Schüfftan showed—as one of his students noticed—a lighted lamp and no light, just a surreal ray above it. That’s what I mean: if you can’t interpret light, then you have amateur photography. It’s so easy today with these new cameras to shoot a beautiful picture.

For the second and third part of this interview see here and here

– Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later. For further resources on Marcel Carné and Children of Paradise, visit www.marcel-carne.com.